


the trick is to keep breathing

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 4x21 speculative, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Framework, Tumblr Prompt, aos spoilers, or a hopeful ending anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 15:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10856517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: Anon requested on Tumblr: "Fitz with Ophelia 'I'll never stop fighting you!'"Set after Ophelia kidnaps Fitz at the end of 4x20. She needs him for her plan, and is he too distraught to fight her?





	the trick is to keep breathing

**Author's Note:**

> title from the garbage song "the trick is to keep breathing."

He doesn’t fight. When she lands them in a desert and lets go, he barely has the strength to lean over before throwing up.

“Oh, Leopold,” she says, concern etched into her features. “I’m so sorry. You’ll get used to the teleportation.”

As if an unexpected dematerializing is even on the radar of things to churn his stomach. He has been split wide open, the core of him exposed for everyone to see. He has flaws, so many of them, and before he might have listed them dispassionately: temper, loyalty to the point of blindness, jealousy, arrogance, a false bravado when he secretly feels like a coward. Years ago, he remembers thinking: _Jemma knows my flaws and she loves me anyway. I’m not a bad person._

But now the protective film has been stripped away and he’s seeing clearly for the first time; this darkness has always been there. He _is_ a bad person. He’s an _evil_ person, and he has hurt people. His brain spins with images of his friends and his victims. In another reality, he had yelled at Mace for sending Jemma away without warning, but the punishment for that was not supposed to be death.

“You mean nothing to me,” he had told the woman he’d wanted to marry, and he would have killed her. His hand shakes, as if still straining with the weight of the gun. Fitz falls to the ground, rocks biting into his knees. He can’t remember how to breathe.

“It gets easier with time,” Ophelia says, attempting to run a comforting hand along his arm. He turns his face from her and retches again.

++

He doesn’t fight because he doesn’t have the strength and deep down he knows he deserves this punishment anyway. Perhaps he is doomed to wander through the desert with her for forty years; he hopes they both die before reaching her promised land.

“I understand what you’re going through,” she tells him. “And I’m going to help you, because you were the only one to treat me with compassion when I was a slave.”

“Don’t you regret anything you’ve done?” he asks. It’s the only thing he’s said in hours. For a moment, he’s not sure he’s even spoken aloud.

Ophelia gazes at him searchingly and then frowns, as if working through her own emotions. “No,” she finally replies. “I have learned so much, Leopold. I fixed a single regret for each of you, to make you happy. And everyone simply created new regrets.”

He wants to tell her that she rewrote his entire life. He wants to tell her that she took away all of his choices, that he loves his mother and would never have traded her for a lifetime with an abusive father. _I wanted a father who loved me and supported me and stayed_ , he thinks, _surely you knew this isn’t what I meant._

But he doesn’t argue with her because this, like everything, is his fault. You don’t put wishes out into the universe without carefully considering the consequences—he of all people should have known that.

“Humans don’t understand what’s best for them,” she says. “This is what I’ve learned. All this capacity for feeling, for free will, and they waste it. We’re going to create something better. We’re going to _help_ people, and we’re going to be so happy.”

He marvels at how genuinely delighted she appears. Maybe she stole his soul to become a real person because he can’t even remember what happiness feels like. He thinks of Jemma, but all of his good memories are tainted by the acrid smell of gunpowder and the words he’ll never be able to take back.

“It’s time to go,” Ophelia says, grabbing his arm to disappear him again. He shudders at her touch, but he doesn’t fight. He doesn’t know how.

++

He sits in an abandoned house, head in his hands, and breathes through another panic attack. Ophelia, it seems, is growing impatient with his weakness.

“I need your help,” she says. “For our plan. And if you’d just let me, I can make all this pain go away.”

But he needs the pain, because it’s there to remind him that this world is real. He cries when he thinks of Jemma, but he needs to replay her words over and over so that he never forgets what he’s done and why he’s here. He has lost faith in everything, but he offers up silent prayers anyway: _keep her safe. Keep them all safe, and I will stay here with Ophelia and I will not fight._ No one could accuse him of not accepting his prison sentence.

Ophelia’s plan doesn’t make much sense to him, although perhaps that is because nothing makes sense to him at the moment. Or perhaps she doesn’t fully trust him so she’s only letting him in on part of it.

He has so little strength, but he holds her back in small ways. He sabotages where he can. Sometimes he hears Jemma’s voice in his head, guiding his actions. Sometimes he even sees her, but she never lays a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he tells this imaginary Jemma. “I understand.”

“Is this how you felt?” Ophelia asks, kneeling next to him. She has procured a bed for them to share, but he spends every night curled up in the corner of the living room, the stiff wood of the floor burning his joints. “Is this how it felt when she chose someone else? Do you know how much you’re hurting me?”

No, he thinks, of course this is not how it felt. With Jemma, his heart had shattered into a fine dust. With Jemma, he had seen her videos and known she loved him, maybe even loved him the most, and that made it hurt more. But with Jemma, he had thought her happiness could be enough to save them both.

Now, he and Ophelia are locked in a sick dance and when he falls, he will pull her down with him. He will sacrifice himself to stop her, and his anger and disgust and self-hatred will be enough to save the world.

++

“Fitz, you have to hold on. We’re nearly there,” Jemma pleads, and he nods absentmindedly at her ghost.

“I know,” he says. “I’m doing everything I can to hold her off. It’s getting harder though. I know she doesn’t trust me.”

“ _Fitz_ ,” she says, more insistently than he’s heard her before. “Fitz, look at me. We’re going to get through this together.”

He frowns, turning to the far end of the room where he’d gently placed her in his mind. She sits on a table, legs swinging back and forth, back and forth. She’s wearing her button-up and blue jumper again. In those days, he hadn’t understood the depth of his love for her, but he also hadn’t known how it would feel to lose her. He gives her a tentative smile, but she only sighs and looks away.

“Over _here_ ,” she demands, and he starts when he realizes his Jemma hasn’t moved her lips at all. He turns his head towards the sound and walks slowly to the corner of the kitchen, where a dwarf suddenly blinks into existence.

“Je-Jemma?” he stutters, kneeling down towards the little drone. He can’t help flinching as it moves towards him. He remembers exactly what he’d created them for in the Framework. But Sleepy nuzzles his hand like a pet and he tries to let that memory go.

“Oh thank god, Fitz. We’ve been trying to find you for ages.” There isn’t a two-way video connection, but he can imagine her teary smile of relief and he fights the urge to beg her to come for him. As hard as he’s tried to accept his new life, and as much as he knows he deserves it, hearing her voice submerges him in a longing for something he knows he’ll never have again.

“It’s too dangerous,” he whispers furtively, even though Ophelia won’t be back for hours. “I’ve been sabotaging her work. You just have to stop Ivanov and then you’ll be safe. Everyone will be safe.”

“I’m not leaving you there, that’s ridiculous.” He closes his eyes and breathes through the memories. He remembers how good it felt to drown for her, and yet how terribly unfair it had been. For once he agrees with Ophelia—sometimes, people just don’t know what’s best for them. At the end of the day, Jemma is his best friend in the entire world, and he would never allow anyone to treat her the way he has. Someday, she’ll understand.

“I don’t want to leave,” he tells her, hoping the connection is weak enough to hide the lie painted across his face. “I can fight her from here.”

“ _Fitz_ —” she attempts, but a hand reaches down and pulls him up by the collar in a swift motion that causes him to gag. Ophelia throws him back against the counter and then smashes the dwarf under her heel. Sparks fly and he feels a pang of sorrow—for Sleepy, and for losing his last connection to another life.

It’s okay, Fitz thinks as Ophelia advances on him, rage contorting her face. He was given the gift of Jemma saying his name one last time. He knows he’s a bad person, an evil person, but god, he’s so weak and he’s so in love, and dying with her voice in his head doesn’t feel like a punishment at all.  

“How _dare_ you, Leopold?” Ophelia screams, and he wonders if this is the first time she’s truly lost control. He wonders if she relishes this feeling like she’s relished all her other new emotions. “After everything I’ve done for you! I _love_ you, and you love me.”

It’s not even a question and for some reason this makes him smile. When Jemma had told him unequivocally how much she loved him, it had still taken ages to allow himself to believe someone he loved with his whole soul could feel the same way. “You and I are very different people,” he muses, and this infuriates her even more.

She advances on him, her eyes dark and molten. He can’t believe he’d found her beautiful in the Framework. He also can’t believe he’d ever feared her. “You will stay with me and you will help me,” she growls.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Yes, I will stay with you. But I will never stop fighting you.”

She lunges at him, gripping his arms so tightly she breaks the skin, but it’s clear what she’s expecting to happen doesn’t happen. She blinks rapidly, at a loss. “What have you _done_?” she hisses. “Why can’t I leave?”

“It’s science,” he says, but he’s not quite himself enough for the joke that had come to him so easily years ago. Anyway, that was another lifetime. He is no longer that person. Maybe he never had been.

He shakes her hands off of him and meets her glare fully, for the first time since she’d kidnapped him weeks ago. “It’s just me and you,” he tells her. “We’re stuck here together. We deserve this. Just accept it, Ophelia. We deserve to die here.”

“I don’t deserve _any_ of this!” she screams, pushing him away and marching to the door. She throws it open and finds she cannot step over the threshold. He has trapped them both here and soon they will run out of food and soon his crimes will only live on as memories.

“This isn’t over,” she seethes, slamming the door to her room shut. Fitz sits in his usual corner, the sudden silence overbearing. He looks over at Jemma, who has been sitting on the table watching everything unfold with a quiet intensity.

“I knew it,” he whispers. “I knew we could do it.”

She doesn’t share his pride. She merely arches a perfect eyebrow and stares at him with a mixture of sadness and contempt. “Do you think this exonerates you? Do you think you deserve forgiveness?”

He bows his head in shame and swallows back down the urge to cry. “No, I don’t deserve forgiveness.” Minutes stretch into hours and soon the room is bathed in darkness. He can barely make out her outline. He knows he should let her go, but a part of him is afraid to die alone.

“Do you think there’s really a hell?” he asks her. His own religious tradition growing up hadn’t subscribed to fire-and-brimstone, and he’d long ago lost any real spiritual belief anyway. But now there’s something strangely comforting about the idea of being eternally damned for what he’s done.

“I hope so,” she tells him, steely flint in her voice.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.” It’s only when he touches his face that he realizes he’s crying. It’s only now that he realizes how afraid he is. He wishes he’d told Jemma he loved her, but maybe that’s just being selfish.

++

He’s so weak from hunger and from the terror of Ophelia’s rages when plan after plan fails. Jemma sits next to him, silent and unmoving. It’s a funny way to die, he thinks, caught between the woman he loves who can’t love him back, and the woman who thinks they’re in love, as if love is a chemical equation that need only be properly balanced to work.

There’s nothing left to fight for, he realizes. No one is coming to save him and surely by now the team has finally prevented Ophelia’s attempt at world domination, or whatever it is she’d actually wanted. He’s having a hard time remembering at this point.

He can let go. He can close his eyes and just let go.

He feels a hand on his shoulder, so soft he could be imagining it. He opens his eyes and sees Jemma peering down at him from her usual perch on the table. So he is imagining it, but he places a hand atop hers anyway.

“Maybe we should keep fighting,” she says. “Just in case Ophelia manages a new plan.”

He is so tired he can barely remember who Ophelia is or why it’s so important to fight her mysterious plans. But Jemma would never lead him astray and he wants her to know how truly sorry he is.

“Okay,” he sighs, the word barely audible as it scratches past his dry throat. “Okay, we’ll keep fighting.”

++

Fitz is long past the point of keeping his hallucinations separate from reality. He can’t parse out his real lifetime from his Framework life, and he can’t remember how long it will take before his body finally gives in. It’s almost admirable, the way a body fights to survive no matter what, but now it mostly seems inconvenient.

So when Daisy quakes in the door to the house and a man with flames for a head appears behind her, he isn’t even surprised. It probably isn’t real, but if it is he’s pleased the devil has finally found him.

Everything is so loud and bright—too loud and bright. He nearly passes out.

“Fitz, Fitz, oh thank god, oh, Fitz,” a woman says, falling to her knees on the floor next to him and wrapping him up in her arms.

He’s so confused. Jemma looks like an angel, so why is she here with the devil? Is this the part where they fight over his soul?

“You’re safe,” she whispers, “you’re safe, and it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.” She lifts his head up to meet her eyes and then kisses him hungrily, all over his face, and he wonders if this is part of the judgment, reliving your life in technicolor. This is the moment of his first confession. Maybe this time, he will drown in absolution.

She presses her lips to his desperately, and somehow he finds the strength to kiss her back. _You mean everything to me_ , he wants to say. _I hope our atoms find each other in another life. I hope we get another chance._ But he can’t say anything, he can only pull her closer to him, as if it’s possible to fuse their bodies. He kisses her greedily, like he’s never felt the touch of another human before.

“I _love_ you,” she says, when she stops to breathe. “I’ve always loved you and I always will.”

He crumples then, falling forward into her arms, and sobs. He’s not even sure how he has enough water left in his body to cry, but the tears spill from his eyes with the force of an ocean current. Everything hurts. Every part of his brain and his body and his heart aches. But he finds, in the end, that he’s overwhelmingly grateful she came back for him, that she’s allowing him the solace of dying in her arms.

++

The line between sleeping and waking is paper thin, like he’s taken a single step and emerged into a new world. Everything should be familiar, but it’s not. The hospital bed with its stiff sheets, the darkness of med bay broken up with emergency lights, the sounds of a base in perpetual motion in the distance. Here he has made his home, and he doesn’t recognize any of it.

A chair scrapes the floor next to him, and then Jemma’s hand is in his, her fingers cold and calloused and impossibly soft.

“There he is,” she says with a smile, but her voice is thick with tears. His breath catches at how radiant she is, and he hates himself for ever forgetting how her presence fills his lungs with oxygen.

“Fitz,” she whispers, running a hand along his face and drawing his attention towards her eyes. “I need you to listen to me very carefully, okay?”

He tries to nod, but he’s so weak.

“This is going to be hard. It’s going to be so hard, but we’re going to get through this together. But you can’t give up. I know what you’re thinking, and I know why you think you deserve…” She pauses to inhale shakily before pressing a kiss to the back of his hand. “You have to fight. We’re both going to work so hard and it’s going to get better. But you need to fight for us, okay?”

She’s looking at him like she truly believes he can do anything, like she believes he’s the same man he’s always been, and more than anything he can’t live with disappointing her again.

He licks his dry lips and leans back against his pillow. Already, he feels the little strength he has dissipating. Already, the siren pull of sleep is too strong to ignore. He squeezes her fingers gently and closes his eyes.

“Okay,” he promises. He has nothing left to give her, except for this one last breath: “Okay, I’ll fight.”


End file.
